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Congress stood up by search engines

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all found themselves too busy to attend a …

What if you threw a party and no one came? That's the situation facing the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which is meeting today to discuss the role of American technology companies in China. The four companies invited to attend the event were Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Cisco, but it appears that none were anxious to show up for a hearing at which they would be grilled about their contributions to censorship in China.

Google did issue a statement about the matter today, in which they suggest that a combination of industry guidelines (such as letting a user know when a search has been censored) and US government pressure on China are the appropriate response to the Chinese demand for Internet censorship. Andrew McLaughlin, Senior Policy Counsel at Google, makes clear that Google does not like censoring information, but believes on balance that it is better to offer a censored Chinese version of Google than no Google at all.

"While China has made great strides in the past decades, it remains in many ways closed. We are not happy about governmental restrictions on access to information, and we hope that over time everyone in the world will come to enjoy full access to information. Information and communication technology ? including the Internet, email, instant messaging, weblogs, peer-to-peer applications, streaming audio and video, mobile telephony, SMS text messages, and so forth ? has brought Chinese citizens a greater ability to read, discuss, publish and communicate about a wider range of topics, events, and issues than ever before. We believe that our continued engagement with China is the best (and perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there."

Not to be outdone, Yahoo and Microsoft issued a joint statement of their own in which they played all the same notes.

"Beyond commercial considerations, we believe that our services have promoted personal expression and enabled far wider access to independent sources of information for hundreds of millions of individuals in China and elsewhere in the world."

But it looks like Congress wants more than press releases. Another hearing on February 15 will examine the same issue, but this time will be held by the House International Relations Committee—a committee with subpoena power. Though it's not yet clear whether the committee might compel companies to testify, most of the corporations involved have already made clear to Congress that they will send someone to put in a personal appearance. After all, the first thing that they teach you in PR 101 is to keep the word "subpoenaed" from following your company's name in newspaper headlines.

While no one from industry showed up at today's hearing, the nonprofits were out in force. Representatives from Reporters without Borders, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, among others, were present to give testimony to the Caucus—and you can bet that they weren't advocating censorship.

Companies seem to be feeling the heat and have begun changing or clarifying their policies regarding censorship. Bill Gates also gave a speech in Portugal today in which he defended his company's need to obey local laws, even as he claimed that censorship would be ultimately ineffective. Cisco also released a statement recently aimed at dispelling the persistent rumor that it sold China custom hardware designed to make censorship simple. The company, it says, "has not designed or marketed products for any government to censor Internet content." Reporters without Borders disagrees—and they were the ones who had the Congressional ear today.

If public outcry grows too loud, will any of the companies pull out of China altogether? Would this be a good thing for either the Chinese or the corporate bottom line? Stay tuned. Now that this is a political issue, though, we can expect to see some intelligent debate but also a whole lot of grandstanding—and in an election year, anything is possible.